A Matter of Personality

Mechanics of the Dance Machine

Armitage Gone! Dance

New York Live Arts

Through Feb. 9

New York

Trisha Brown first made a name for herself in the 1960s when she appeared on the New York dance scene as a performer of quiet charisma and a dance maker of regularly sly rebelliousness. In 1963, for instance, she created the short-lived and absurdly witty-sounding "Improvisations on a Chicken Coop Roof." Ms. Brown formed her Trisha Brown Dance Company in 1970, the same year she created the straightforward but eerie event for a solo male dancer, matter-of-factly called "Man Walking Down the Side of a Building."

Last week, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Ms. Brown's company launched a three-year international tour called "Proscenium Works, 1979-2011." The program was devised by Diane Madden and Carolyn Lucas, longtime associates of Ms. Brown, 76, whose title now becomes founding artistic director and choreographer. The company plans to carry on Ms. Brown's legacy, but without her direct participation. Her failing health has been cited as the reason, and the two most recent works on this program have been announced as her last.

These two dances, both from 2011, bookended the opening bill at BAM. "Les Yeux et l'âme" is a dance suite excerpted from Ms. Brown's evening-long "Pygmalion" (2010), set to
Jean-Philippe Rameau's
1748 music. The work's plain and often silken take on Baroque-era dance aesthetics came with an apt scrawl in the background, an enlargement of one of Ms. Brown's own drawings.

The freely curlicued graphic and the comradely and casually sinuous dance numbers neatly complemented each other. With the eight-dancer cast clad in loose, moonstone-gray pajamalike costumes (by Elizabeth Cannon), their fluid moves brought home echoes of the "misshapen pearl"—the meaning of "Baroque."

"I'm going to toss my arms—if you catch them they're yours," also an eight-dancer work, was as cluttered and jumbled as "Les Yeux" was concentrated and coherent. Named for a phrase Ms. Brown used when improvising with her dancers, "Toss" was created with Ms. Lucas's assistance, but seems to have been arranged by committee. Alvin Curran's original music,
Burt Barr's
visual setting of several industrial fans and
Kaye Voyce's
layered and eventually peeled away costuming all failed to impress. As the two-piece outer costumes came undone in the busy course of the dance's ill-focused activity, the work itself accentuated a coming apart at the seams—inadvertently, one presumes.

More rewarding were two revivals: "Homemade," Ms. Brown's 1966 brief excursion of a solo with a home movie projector strapped on the soloist's back, running a film of the dancer performing the same prearranged, seemingly pedestrian moves of the choreography; and "Newark (Niweweorce)," an eight-dancer work from 1987 that included spare-and-yet-lush walls of vividly saturated color by
Donald Judd,
who also worked with composer
Peter Zummo
on the industrial humming of the intermittant score. Former company member
Vicky Shick
made easy but indelible work of the solo and all the gray-clad men and women of the group dance burned their concentrated, calibrated moves and formally patterned choreography into one's memory.

***

Karole Armitage
first came to notice during the late 1970s as a formidable, willowy dancer in
Merce Cunningham's
company. She began creating her own work even before she left his troupe.

She put herself on the map as a notably eye-catching dance maker in 1981 with "Drastic-Classicism," a wild, free-for-all pairing hyperactive dance activity with ear-splittingly loud rock music. Her moniker soon became that of a punk ballerina.

In 1979 she founded Armitage Gone!; in 1985, Armitage Ballet; and in 2004, Armitage Gone! Dance. While she made the odd appearance as a dancer in her recent groups, for the current run of Armitage Gone! Dance at New York Live Arts Ms. Armitage remains offstage during her "Mechanics of the Dance Machine," an approximately hour-long work for her company, supplemented for the occasion by seven additional dancers.

Before the opening performance began, the still willowy 58-year-old woman announced that, contrary to stated plans, her dance would not involve inviting audience members to leave their seats. "I've had a change of heart," Ms. Armitage revealed. As it turned out, Ms. Armitage's original scheme of letting the audience move in and around the dancing with calculated direction—abandoned due to what was deemed an unsuitable space at NYLA—might have added a focus and interest that the dance performed at a set distance failed to deliver.

"Mechanics" played out as a display of posture-filled vignettes mostly executed in place for a constantly evolving selection of individuals, couples and groups, alongside a mix of monotonously manipulated musical tracks from "Concerto for Turntables and Orchestra" by DJ/composer
Gabriel Prokofiev,
grandson of Sergei.

One element often missing from Ms. Armitage's dances whenever her own engaging and spontaneous presence is absent is simply a force-of-nature personality. In their undergarmentlike costuming with red accents (by
Alba Clemente
and
Deanne Berg MacLean
), the 15 dancers had the effect more of mannequins than personalities. Only the statuesque
Abbey Roesner,
the seemingly bemused
Charles Askekard
and the feisty
Emily Wagner
brought more than dutiful execution to the choreography. For the most part, "Mechanics" amounted to random studies rather than lasting moments of dance theater.

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